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Simply Bad Game Design - Gearscore
Eronakis
Member UncommonPosts: 2,249
I recently came back to World of Warcraft out of sheer curiosity and boredom since last October. Little did I know, this new entity of game design has taken absolute control of this game which they call gear score.
A little bit about me in my WoW days, I played since 2006, an undead mage the same character the whole time. Why? Because it was the only decent looking character model with decent animations, no over proportioned body parts and the mage class was the only class I could tolerate there.
When I last played I was in full tier 7 gear. I downloaded this addon because I was curious of this new gear score phenomena that breached wow like wild fire. Well, it was around 4k.
There were a lot of spamming on raids for VoA 10 and 25. Apparently they added two new bosses since I last played. I sent someone a tell that I would like to go. First thing he asked was, “what was your gear score?” I said 4k. He said, “no way”. I was confused, wait a minute, I use to do well on dps in VoA 10 and 25 back in the day and now I can’t go? I was puzzled. I asked the guy is it because of my low gear score? The player simply said yes, and told me I was a horrible player because of my low gear score. Woah! And that’s not the first time someone said that because of my low gear score.
After a week or so, I had to get around a 5k-5k2 gear score to even be considered to raid. This bothered me as a long time mmorpg player and game designer. I worked my way up to a 4k9 gear score to see if I was eligible to be considered for a ToC or ICC raid. Interesting enough, no one would take me because I was a 100 gs off. So basically, my dps output was being belittled because I didn’t breach that requirement.
I was considered a horrible player because I did not have “gear.” Consider, that gear is not a deterrent to factor in over player skill. Obviously, players in world of warcraft, at least most of them believe that is true. “That if you don’t have the gear you’re a horrible player”
Now, I completely comprehend that WoW’s game design philosophy is based all around how you build your character off certain stats and specs. For instance, mages now need haste and spell power. Before I quit it was hit and spell power. In WoW as a player your dependent on how well geared your character is to produce the highest quality of damage output in my case. Because one doesn’t have a high gear score does NOT negate the fact that their player skill is gone. Wait… WoW doesn’t take that much player skill at all besides essential mmorpg common sense, knowing how to macro your abilities and being fast with their somewhat twitch game play to react with certain situations.
With this new mechanic, players are now pigeon hold between a rock and a hard place if they barely miss out on a gear score to go to raids; with or without guild help. This also frustrates the player and makes the game play a job to succeed into being considered a raid spot to further progress your character.
Gear score further strokes unwarranted egos of immature players in which control the community of the core pathway for player’s progression. This simple mechanic destroys the immersion, adventure and fun out of this game which it had very little of to begin with. And now, its been completely omitted.
Gearscore abuse is at the wow's players fault. Technically it should be directed to Blizzard for allowing such an awful game design mechanic (which I suppose they can't do anything about it) They never should allowed 3rd party ui's and addons to begin with but thats a whole other thread. There are a lot of bad game design philosophies in WoW such as being completely dependent on gear with high stat based composition. It does not allow a player to adapt to situations with their class using the players mind to develop their own strategy but instead you have to “spec” by class and gear to achieve success. No way in hell does this game give any sort of challenge but a colossal amount of frustration and shrugs.
I for one, hope that newer mmorpgs and current existing ones do not adapt this gear score mechanic at all because it ruins all factors of the qualities of true mmorpg aspects. Futhurmore, gearscore is just mortor to the corner stone of gear which should be not be used to it's degree. Gear in mmorpgs should be only about 25% advantage for players whether it is PVE or PVP. In my own personal opinion to shy away from gear being completely dependent for players “skill level”; is to design a diverse combat system which complements a deep structure class system where players can develop skill by strategy rather than gear. Gear should be a perk to help you progress easier which will balance out most other mechanics later on not a major contributing factor for all progression. Remember, mmorpgs are suppose to be for, community and adventure.
Note* Edited post because I had disinformation
Comments
You are probably thinking about the April Fools Day joke where Blizzard mocked Gearscore.
Blizzard agrees that the player base is abusing the Gearscore mod but there is nothing they can do about it. They could ban Gearscore but people would find other ways to discriminate.
Also, you make it sound like people discriminating others based on simple things is exclusive to WoW. Sorry, but again, you are completely wrong.
OMG ! An other wow hater that thinks that easter jokes are REAL ! GET OVER IT !
I hope you find some intellect somewhere. I wasn't aware that there was an april fools joke about it. I was wrong about being blizzards fault. Truly its the player base in which you act just like them. However, I expected immature posts like yours who do not have any reading comprehension.
Thanks for the insight, I wasn't aware and I apologize, will edit the thread. Thanks.
I played WoW from 2004-2009. It was an awesome game in vanilla, a decent one in TBC and totally fail in Wotlk. now it's a lobby game.
- I recently joined in again (around feburary) to play with some friends at a lan (yes they forced me) and gave me a 80 (one of them have like 11 or so) so I could play with them (moved to a account) anyways. It had around 3k gearscore.. Fair enough, we tried to do some dungeons through dungeon finder (horrible tool) and people left due to my low gearscore.. That is horrible.
After some grind (yes its bad grind in instances) I got around 4.9k gs. We moved on to raids. Oh well, not at all! because NOONE would take me, they took my friends cause they had 5.6-6k... This game is fucked.
Why I moved to EVE.
Wow ur all guns out man! Dont you think that if your comment was real about wow it would have go out wayyyyy before today ?
C'mon did you really think you were the first to think about this? And btw my immature respond is as high as your hate comment... quite low. Did you had any sources to proove your point ? Or was it only a free run against wow?
I could say that STO is a corkscrew game but it would be useless and futile... like your comment.
If you understood any game design or game mechanics you would know where I was coming from. Circular reasoning ftl.
Oh I think you should read this article here, this guy hit the nail on the head. This was posted on another thread -
http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=4221#1942b
Izork, I dont know what you were playing but random heroics in WOW, none quit a group because someone has low GS. YES you will be kicked of a raid because of low GS but no such nonesence on random heroics. Also if your were forced to play WOW with your friends why were they not grouping with you ?
They were ,but we were only 3 people :=)
Yes, people left in heroics.
- About raids is enough for me to see this game isn't working. Don't try to defend it. I'm not a hater either. The game was EPIC in vanilla, it was ok in tbc..
but now.. I don't have worth for how fail it is. Mainstream=Fail
Ultimately, if you want to participate in a raid or other group activity organized and run by complete strangers, you play by their rules.
Organizing a pug raid is a pain in the ass, hence people who do it want to maximize the chances of success. I'm sure you'll tell us that you're a fantastic player (everyone who complains about gearscore is always a fantastic player, it seems). but they don't know whether you are or not. Hence, it makes sense to them to only take well-geared strangers to minimize the chance that they'll turn out to be incapable of contributing sufficiently.
Your alternatives are to either raid with friends & guildmates, or to organize your own pug raids. Or not to raid, I suppose.
But bear in mind, that despite this plague on the game, at least its possible for people outside solid guilds to actually raid and see current content now. Good luck pugging Naxx towards the end of vanilla WoW, or Sunwell towards the end of TBC.
I understand where your coming from. I mean it was almost the same way in EQ for non guilded raids. However, they usually never based anyones chances of getting into the raid because of their gear as much. It's just the principle behind the matter here. If someone doesn't have the means to grant them a chance at a raid doesn't negate the fact they are a bad player. They just didn't receive that gear yet to be given that chance I suppose. I don't plan on returning to wow after my 1 month sub runs out. I don't know, I might be in the minority that you should be allowed to progress with out gear where it's not dependent on how you play your character.
Dont get me wrong eronakis, GS limitations are bad, GS is a plague into the game cuz it makes gear more valuable than skills. But it is true that sometimes its usefull : a 3.5k GS player cant go in ICC, hes just dead meat. GS is a tool not a rule but most people cant understand that.
Yeah I suppose. Because the poor community in WoW, they abuse it and don't give any compromises. It's basically boils down to blizzards game design philosophy that you need gear to advance which I highly disagree with.
Once a gain i'll argue with you, gear is part of all games, like it or not, some people pays real money to get better gear (either in-game stores or gold sellers) and it aint only in WOW. For the the poor community point, Wow has more people than any other game its normal it has more stupid people also ... I dont believe that a game has a better or bad community, I play with some really good guys and some of em became RL friends, you just have to find them.
Although your first post lacked any merit, I would have to say that you are correct with this response. I don't like it either but it is impossible for the best player in the world to fulfill his role without the required gear. Too much focus on gear in my opinion. I dunno who's to blame, Blizzard for desiging it that way or the players who asked for it.
I wouldn't blame the community. There are a lot of cool people hiding out in WoW, you just have to find them.
I understand Blizzards design philosophy. The problem is, players must progress in some way after they level and blizzard does this with gear. Overtime I feel they started creating too much of an advancement - trying to make things more and more epic. There could be some hope that Cata may even some of these numbers out, reducing the gap between players and the gear needed for their content.
Lets talk about those points you feel are not valid. Why do you feel they are not and what do you think about the OP's post.
I'm not trying to play hall monitor but lets keep this thread about the topic, both of you. I've seen too many flame wars over the past few days and would like an honest conversations amoung peers.
Its mostly the designers fault.
The players only want a 'reason' to run these dungeons and raid instances. Those reasons could be filled by anything really (Boss kill score, Trophies, guild levels, etc). Thing is Blizzard made it all about loot, so thats what the players crave, because in WoW thats all they really designed. Once you hit level cap thats all you have left is the gear grind, be it in PvE or PvP.
Between the amount of epic gear that gets added to the game (usually a new tier with every new raid instance - which used to happen on a 3 to 6 month schedual) and how much shorter raid instances have become, Blizzard needed a way to slow down progression. This is where the heavy emphasis on gear checks came into play. And it has gotten so bad that even Blizzard has acknowledged this by switching to the new Segmented (or Winged) release of Raid instances, where players are not given the whole dungeon all at once but instead over a course of 4+ weeks. Now the release of new gear has slowed down enough as has progression.
Thing is, as I said earlier there really isnt much Blizzard can do at this point with WoW to quell the whole 'omg gear!' mentality. They missed the boat on adding alternate reasoning for entering endgame content, and 90% of their focus is on PvP ladder systems and player rankings or achievments.
I mean its been what, almost 6 years and more has been recycled in the game than has been added. I mean if you look at it as a whole in almost 6 years all we have gotten was new zones (while some were incredibly well done through quests and design, none of them lasted more than an hour or two before you were finished with them) flying mounts and 1 new class. Everything else has been raid dungeons, instances and several tiers of gear as well as ways to make doing/obtaining these things easier and easier (Badges and LFD tool for farming them) - the same stuff day in and day out.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
I think it's an unavoidable consequence of opening up the content to ad-hoc groups of random players, i.e. pugs.
Yes it's true that not having gear doesn't mean you're a bad player. It might mean that. It might mean you're a new player, and thus probably not as good as an experienced player. It might mean that you're returned from a long break and your once cutting-edge gear is now old hat. It might mean that you're a new alt of an experienced player.
But the thing is, the pug organizers aren't saying "your gearscore is low, therefore you're a bad player, therefore I don't want you in my raid."
They're saying "your gearscore is low, my raid would have a higher chance of being smooth and successful with a better-geared player, therefore I don't want you in my raid."
They don't have an opportunity to judge properly whether you're a good player or not. So they have to use the simple calculus:
"bad player with good gear" > "bad player with bad gear"
"average player with good gear" > "average player with bad gear"
"good player with good gear" > "good player with bad gear"
..and since they have no way of knowing if you're bad, average or good, the equation simplifies down to gear.
Well, of course, you are allowed to progress without gear. It's just that your progression probably won't be boosted by the kindness of strangers organizing raids and bringing you along on them. Organizing pugs is a painful, irritating and largely thankless job. And often even a single wipe will destroy the pug as people leave to avoid being saved to a "fail" raid ID, and then all your effort is wasted. So it's natural for organizers to do everything possible to maximize the chance of a smooth successful raid, and avoid unnecessary risks like taking players who aren't well geared.
As I said in my earlier post, the alternatives are: play with friends and guildmates; or organize your own pugs.
Also, I suspect you'd find that running random heroics until your eyes bleed would enable you to buy enough emblem gear to get past the gearscore wardens. May be an option for you.
Nice reply man ! Since there is no tool to indicate if you are good or bad player ( before joining the raid) the only tool raid leaders have is GS. Everyone want to be succesfull.
Sulthar hit the nail on the head about gearscore.
How do you suggest a person who is inviting people he doesn't know to a raid he/she wants to complete who to invite? This is especially true when raids reset and you just want to get through the trash in order to get where you were last week.
I wouldn't have invited you either Eronakis based on your story.
1. You only had your character back for a week and wanted to raid - gearscore is a bad way to judge a player, yes, but if they don't know who you are its a good tool for an initial assessment. Look it up - http://www.wowwiki.com/Gear_score
2. Where is an armory link to your character? I'm sure those WoW guys would be able to clarify whether or not you'd be able to go into Icecrown.
3. DPS in WoW has always been a competitive spot. Anyone who has played knows this. You can either find a raid leader you knew from before and ask if there is a spot available, or make a name for yourself and keep showing up for raids until you're invited, or you get a better offer from another guild. You've been on facebook; social network yourself.
If you don't like a game, don't knock a mechanic that helps out with getting PUG raid groups together. You also can't blame 24 other players that want to see the content, and not have to carry other people just to gear up. Seriously, have you played other MMOs? Do you think you can waltz into the latest dungeon they put out if you haven't been playing for six monthsl? Play something else.
Can totally agree about the gear score thing being whack.
Back when I was playing in TBC I applied for a guild with my healer since I was pretty well geared with her. When they got a hold of me they told me they were good on healers and they needed a shadow priest and asked me If I would be willing to switch out for that. I told them I had a seperate shadow priest that I was working on but she wasn't well geared. They said that was fine we'll gear her up. They had checked some reference people before I was allowed in the guild and then gave me a test run.
This was all before the whole gear score thing. I did my job by picking out pieces of gear I needed and going for them. I did the off raid runs in Kara and picked up stuff I needed. They did alot of that timed raid , Dont remember what its called. It was with trolls and if you beat the timer you get a bear mount.
To sum up, They allowed me to be low geared and accepted me because they saw I was working to improve my gear. Right before TBC ended and the expansion came out we were working black temple and started hitting sunwell a little. Its all about the guild and other players in this game. If they see you working hard and not dying every five minutes or standing in the fire they will accept you.
I did come back for a Month in WoLK and all I kept hearing is "Gear score" "gear score" crap. I was like WTF is this crap all about. Basically you can be an excellent player will a little bit lower gear and not get accepted into anything because of "Gear Score" Hell even my old guild that I played with wouldnt accept me back becauseof this.
"We dont want to work hard , We just want to go in and PWN everything and be done with it so we can do other Real Life things" Then why play the damn game at all I say. Lazy people , which led me to do whats typed below.
---------> Unsub ----------> Uninstall
BobRoss
I have nothing substantial to add other than to agree with you and everyone else who thinks GS is BS, but I just had to say... AWESOME screen name! In my travels online, I've met very very few others who share my appreciation for the late, great Afro'ed One.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
This. With the upcoming expansion I had briefly toyed with the idea of returning to WOW to see the new content, but this thread reminded me about one of the major reasons I left WOW, the fact that its core design is around an endless hamster wheel of gear acquisition.
But it didn't start with Gear Score, that just makes it easier to quantify what was well in place even in vanilla WOW.
When I first started WOW my guild was the 3rd on the server complete MC successfully, and I left the game for a bit and then re-rolled on a new server. I leveled up my new character (Druid) and applied to a raiding guild and was told I coudln't join until I had all blue gear. At the time my Druid only had 2 green rings (everything else blue) which was far fewer greens then what my Paladin wore when we first tackled MC (which was a mostly green set).
I was pretty pissed off that my experience in the core had no merit, I was being judged simply because of two rings. I was forced to go re-run some lower level instances till I was fortunate to get one desirable ring to drop, and fortunately was able to buy another on the auction house.
Later on, after we had BWL on farm status and I was colllecting gear in AC40 they announced in detail what BC would bring to the game (10 more levels) and it was apparent that even level 63 greens dropped in the game world exceed the power of my current armor and was the icing on the cake and I quit the game for good.
No, the mechanic was in place at the beginning, GS just makes it painfully obvious. WOW certainly isn't alone in this mechanic, hence I now spend my time almost exclusively in EVE.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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